This week, I am pleased to present my fourth interview with the vegan sociologist Matthew Cole, Senior Lecturer at The Open University. Matthew has been a vegan since 2005 and is the author and co-author of a number of academic articles and book chapters about the sociology of veganism and human-nonhuman animal relations. With his partner, the vegan sociologist Kate Stewart, Matthew co-authored the 2014 book, Our Children and Other Animals: The Cultural Construction of Human-Animal Relations in Childhood. In 2016, an anthology was published that was edited by Matthew Cole, Núria Almiron, and Carrie Freeman, titled, Critical Animal and Media Studies: Communication for Nonhuman Animal Advocacy.

In this interview, we discuss critical animal and media studies, and Matthew tells me about his research with Kate Stewart about human cultural attitudes towards urban-dwelling foxes in the UK. We also explore the place of environmental arguments in vegan advocacy, the use of mainstream and independent media to promote animal rights, how veganism tends to be portrayed by the mainstream media, and Matthew’s more recent writing on the similarities between a Batman storyline and a campaign to rename two species of aquatic animals in the UK. Then Matthew shares an update about the Donald Watson Archive Research Project.

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